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In the pursuit of easy money

In the pursuit of easy money

There is another approach to digital security: “fingerprinting” the machines that make modern counterfeiting so tempting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that US authorities have succeeded in getting some colour laser printer makers to digitally label each page their printers produce. The privacy concerns are obvious: these machines do not know if a document is a forged banknote or a love letter.

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Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in...

If printer maker Lexmark International prevails against ink cartridge reseller Impression Products, tech giants and other American companies will gain the ability to control products through patent claims after they have been sold. Daniel Nazer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents...

If printer maker Lexmark International prevails against ink cartridge reseller Impression Products, tech giants and other American companies will gain the ability to control products through patent claims after they have been sold. Daniel Nazer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents...

EFF submitted FOIA requests to several government agencies seeking information related to the agencies' use of "printer dots" -- tracking codes embedded in pages printed from certain printers.
In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each...

This week marks the seventh annual Sunshine Week, a national initiative to promote dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. As our little way to celebrate, EFF has recently posted nearly nine thousand pages of government documents to our site. For the majority of these...

Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovered the existence of these dots through the Freedom of Information Act and says that the government should at least put out warnings or an advisement to consumers saying that these dots exist.

Among the databases: financial records, credit card data, even Blockbuster accounts.
From a privacy standpoint, ''it's a lot and it's quite scary,'' says Lee Tien, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a list of color laser printers that, it says, lay down light yellow code-patterns on every print; the dots are viewable in blue light or under magnification. These codes were developed to help the federal government track down criminals who were printing counterfeit cash. But...

It's a simple sheet of paper, some text, and a touch of color, but secrets lie hidden on the surface, invisible specks that hold enormous implications.
"It's not something that's sort of sunk into general public consciousness by this point," says Seth Schoen, a cyber investigator.
Schoen's base of operations...

In a recent review of the HP Color LaserJET CM3530 printer, the magazine Government Computer News called out the use of tracking codes -- which GCN referred to as "a secret spy program" -- as the biggest problem with that printer. GCN found that the yellow dots produced by...